The Crippling World Of Men’s Anxiety - Tim Clare

... but when you are on the floor having shoved a towel in your mouth to try and cover the sound of you screaming so your baby daughter doesn't hear because you don't want her to be afraid in sort of two rooms away while your wife looks after her, I think it's impossible for anyone, no matter what their relationship to masculinity, to feel diminished by that.

(wind blowing) What is your expertise? What gives you license to write a book about anxiety?

So, the awful truth is, (laughs) is, is that I was sitting down having written sort of a couple of novels and thinking, "What can I write about?" And I'd written non-fiction before, and I was like, "What am I an expert?" Well, because like you say, like when you're pitching something, whether it's like an article or a book, one of, one of the four pitch lines, you know, it's like, "This is a story about this," or, "I wanted to look into this. The reason why I'm the person to do this, and you shouldn't get a better known celebrity to do it instead, is 'cause this is my area of expertise." And I was like, "What am I an expert on?" And it was like, "Well, I'm mentally ill, like, (laughs) I guess. Like, I'm really anxious." Like, I was like, at the time, like I had a two-year-old daughter. Um, she's still, she's just older now. I still have a daughter, she's just older. But, um, and I, I was really struggling with, like, severe anxiety and panicked that was like, I was having panic attacks every week. S- sometimes I was having multiple ones a day that would, like, put me on the floor, and I'd have several a day over like a three-day period. And I was like, "This is taking... This is just like, this is unlivable." And also, you know, in my work I do doing like a creative writing podcast, I'd started to have like neuroscientists on. I'd started having psychologists on. I studied like four years of psychology back in school, but I'm not like qualified. My background is in, in writing. But I, I, I'd spoken to these guys and had some really interesting beginning talks about the brain and, you know, the differences when they put like writers in an MRI scan- fMRI scanner and stuff like that. And so I was like think... And then we signed my daughter up to a developmental s- study where they started studying her brain and the development of kids at different ages. And I got to take her in and see, they put this thing called an fNIRS on her, which is, it's like a portable scanner in a kind of skull cap. It looks like a Medusa fright wig. They stick it on her head. She looked like, uh, like, uh, well, she looked like a cross between Medusa, and this is like a very deep cut nerd reference, but like, uh, when Patrick Stewart plays like Locutus out of the Borg, she looked like one of the Borg. She had like one eye, red eye piece on that, um, tracks her vision. And I was seeing on a computer different parts of her brain lighting up, uh, because of something called the BOLD response, the blood-oxygen-level-dependent response showing different parts of her brain, uh, as different levels of demand wanted more or less oxygen. And I was like, "I'm watching my daughter think." We are at a level now where psychology and neuroscience, we can like look inside people's heads. And I'm like, "There's got to..." Like, I only get access to this because we signed up to this study, but I'm like, "There's got..." I now know I, there's researchers out there who are willing to speak to me, uh, for some reason. And I guess the reason, the thing was I just wanted to get well. And I was like, "Well, if I say I'm writing a book, these people are gonna open their doors to me."